“Photography is an art for lazy people.” So said Robert Frank, the celebrated Swiss photographer, to Allen Ginsberg, the celebrated New Jersey poet, as they gathered in a Lower East Side flat to make a movie. Frank was at the height of his fame after publishing his monumental collection of photographs, “The Americans,” but had newly re-imagined himself as a beatnik and filmmaker. Also assembled in that apartment were Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and an ensemble cast of hangers-on, lovers, admirers, and jazzmen, ready to conceive another erratic self-portrait.

The film that emerged from that afternoon in 1959 was called “Pull My Daisy,” and though it fell for ages into obscurity, it was reissued in 2008 as the first volume of “Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works,” a beautifully packaged DVD set from Steidl. (Volumes 4, 5 and 6 will go on sale in October.) Narrated by Kerouac in a bluesy ad-lib and built around the wistful tale of a bishop and a railway brakemen, “Pull My Daisy” skitters and crashes around the room like a bad ballerina. But at its end, it collapses at our feet as a beautifully drugged-up and dreamed-out elucidation of our almighty American bards.

After all, we could always bet on the Beats to be their own best biographers. Though they’ve certainly left us an intriguing catalog of written work to document their lives and times, Frank’s film adds an invigorating dimension. But Frank wasn’t the only one pointing a lens on the Beats. Even as Frank was turning away from still photography, Ginsberg was crossing from one end of his remarkable life to the other with a camera in hand, and the images he assembled have been superbly organized into an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (through Sept. 6), accompanied by a glossy volume from Prestel.

The simultaneous resurfacing of Frank’s films and Ginsberg’s photographs gives us a chance to shine the curious light of our decade onto a bewildering moment in American art. Pulling their grimy slice of the old Atomic Age into our confused new millennium, these works stir up the smoky Bowery, hold a lantern to the San Francisco fogs, and re-enchant an exhausted Beat cosmos for a new moment.

We see William Burroughs and Paul Bowles frowning in sun-bleached Morocco; Bob Dylan draped in an overcoat in Tompkins Square Park; and Gary Snyder wearing a monk’s traveling garments in a Kyoto garden. We see Jack Kerouac, young and vital, howling in the Manhattan streets; he reappears later as a drunken and bloated shut-in, just short of death and a long way from the open road.

And since Ginsberg was a great voyager, so we become as well. We travel to Dakar and Leningrad, to sun-filled Parisian dormer windows, to the rooftops of Benares and Marrakech, and to James Joyce’s snowy Zurich grave. Ginsberg’s elaborate, handwritten captions, occasionally composed with Dylan’s help, narrate these scenes in the poet’s characteristically long, Whitmanesque lines, while a spontaneity of prose straight out of a Kerouac all-nighter yanks the images along like an eager pet.

The captions themselves, executed as later-life, retrospective afterthoughts, act as concentrated poem-documentaries and leave us with a welcome first-person perspective of Ginsberg’s peculiar element. When the project is taken as a whole, it seems to serve Ginsberg’s poetry almost as well as William Blake’s prints did for his own verse: as a necessary and lovely companion-opus that springs with new life from the spirit of the writings themselves.

Oddly, Ginsberg’s photographs sat for decades in closets and drawers, then in the tombs of a Columbia University archive. But when scholars finally descended on them with their lamps and spectacles, they found something magnificent. With his secondhand Kodak Retina, the poet had surreptitiously illustrated not only his energetic generation, but his own oeuvre, leaving behind a catalog of images to reawaken the euphoric thesis that he’d scribbled across the arch of his lifetime: namely, that sex and poetry and the “cosmic vibrations” of youth and life are way, way awesome.